WTF? Georgia being sued by several Central and South American countries

By Jeremy Redmon

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Quote:

The Anti-Defamation League, Mexico and the governments of several Central and South American countries filed court papers Wednesday in support of efforts to halt Georgia’s tough new immigration enforcement law.

The other countries joining on the side of those seeking a preliminary injunction in the case include Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center and several other civil and immigrant rights groups filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Georgia's law this month and are now asking a judge to halt the measure pending the outcome of their case. They argue the measure – also known as House Bill 87 – is preempted by federal law and is unconstitutional.

“HB 87 substantially and inappropriately burdens the consistent country to country relations between Mexico and the United States of America,” Mexico says in its brief in support of halting the law, “interfering with the strategic diplomatic interests of the two countries and encouraging an imminent threat of state-sanctioned bias or discrimination.”

State officials filed court papers this week seeking to dismiss the lawsuit. They say the law is constitutional and predict it will survive the court challenge. Proponents say the state needed to act to curb illegal immigration because the federal government has failed to secure the nation's borders. Illegal immigrants, say supporters of Georgia's new law, are burdening the state's taxpayer-funded resources, including public schools, jails and hospitals.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Thrash has set the first hearing in the case for 10 a.m. Monday. He indicated he might rule from the bench that day on the plaintiffs’ request to halt the law.

Similar to a law Arizona enacted last year, Georgia’s measure empowers police to investigate the immigration status of certain suspects. It punishes people who transport or harbor illegal immigrants in Georgia or use fake identification to get a job here. And it requires many businesses to use the federal E-Verify program to ensure their newly hired workers are eligible to work in the United States. Much of the law is scheduled to start taking effect on July 1.

[SARCASM]
I wonder whose side our Justice Dept. will be on? A U.S. State or a foreign country.
[/SARCASM]

NOTE: This post includes substantial material published earlier on this blog. It is published here as the electronic version of today’s AJC column.

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

The results of that investigation have now been released. According to survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.

In response, Deal proposes that farmers try to hire the 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers estimated to live in southwest Georgia. Somehow, I suspect that would not be a partnership made in heaven for either party.

As an editorial in the Valdosta Daily Times notes, “Maybe this should have been prepared for, with farmers’ input. Maybe the state should have discussed the ramifications with those directly affected. Maybe the immigration issue is not as easy as ’send them home,’ but is a far more complex one in that maybe Georgia needs them, relies on them, and cannot successfully support the state’s No. 1 economic engine without them.”

According to the survey, more than 6,300 of the unclaimed jobs pay an hourly wage of just $7.25 to $8.99, or an average of roughly $8 an hour. Over a 40-hour work week in the South Georgia sun, that’s $320 a week, before taxes, although most workers probably put in considerably longer hours. Another 3,200 jobs pay $9 to $11 an hour. And while our agriculture commissioner has been quoted as saying Georgia farms provide “$12, $13, $14, $16, $18-an-hour jobs,” the survey reported just 169 openings out of more than 11,000 that pay $16 or more.

In addition, few of the jobs include benefits — only 7.7 percent offer health insurance, and barely a third are even covered by workers compensation. And the truth is that even if all 2,000 probationers in the region agreed to work at those rates and stuck it out — a highly unlikely event, to put it mildly — it wouldn’t fix the problem.

Given all that, Deal’s pledge to find “viable and law-abiding solutions” to the problem that he helped create seems naively far-fetched. Again, if such solutions existed, they should have been put in place before the bill ever became law, because this impact was entirely predictable and in fact intended.

It’s hard to envision a way out of this. Georgia farmers could try to solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages, but that would create an entirely different set of problems. If they raise wages by a third to a half, which is probably what it would take, they would drive up their operating costs and put themselves at a severe price disadvantage against competitors in states without such tough immigration laws. That’s one of the major disadvantages of trying to implement immigration reform state by state, rather than all at once.

The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow.

In fact, with a federal court challenge filed last week, you have to wonder whether state officials aren’t secretly hoping to be rescued from this mess by the intervention of a judge. But given how the Georgia law is drafted and how the Supreme Court ruled in a recent case out of Arizona, I don’t think that’s likely.

I would much rather pay an extra dollar for a head of lettuce and have American people working the fields for a decent wage and send every friggen illegal back!

In the end it would all balance out, none of the money the Americans made would be sent to Mexico it would all be spent in the USA helping to strengthen our economy, health care cost would come down, my tax money would not be spent educating illegals children so the education budget could be cut, ect, ect!

Welfare recipients should be legally required to be put to work as well. Not socialist style, employed as a job-style.

Want to get "on the dole"? Get on the bus to the farm first and earn your fucking keep!!!

I have a teenage boy who would do it in a heartbeat, he cannot find a full time job within 25 miles of where we live. He has been looking ever since school got out and just now landed a part time job at a pizza place, I told him to try some landscaping companies and he told me after applying at a few it was all Mexicans working for them...WTF?

I have a teenage boy who would do it in a heartbeat, he cannot find a full time job within 25 miles of where we live. He has been looking ever since school got out and just now landed a part time job at a pizza place, I told him to try some landscaping companies and he told me after applying at a few it was all Mexicans working for them...WTF?

I have a teenage boy who would do it in a heartbeat, he cannot find a full time job within 25 miles of where we live. He has been looking ever since school got out and just now landed a part time job at a pizza place, I told him to try some landscaping companies and he told me after applying at a few it was all Mexicans working for them...WTF?

Any employment opportunity worth-a-damn, would require being able to pass a piss test. Since, by your own admission, you and your son smoke pot... that that inability may negativity affect the potential employer pool?

Any employment opportunity worth-a-damn, would require being able to pass a piss test. Since, by your own admission, you and your son smoke pot... that that inability may negativity affect the potential employer pool?